Unhurried suspense in a very English Parsifal

Spoiler warnings are usually surplus to requirements in Parsifal. The staging which opened at Glyndebourne on Saturday, however, offers much to surprise, provoke and often enlighten anyone ready to fall under the spell of Wagner’s last music-drama.

The most conventional aspect of Jetske Mijnssen’s production is its setting at the time of the opera’s premiere in 1882. Wagner had in mind a semi-sacred “play to consecrate a stage”; he adopted Christian signs and symbols – the Grail cup used at the Last Supper, the Spear which pierced Christ’s side – in the service of a new rite of personal redemption which would also secure his legacy at Bayreuth for his family, especially for his wife Cosima.

The main room of a grand pile, in Ben Baur’s set design, makes an English setting for an English Parsifal, a home from home for some of Glyndebourne’s patrons, no doubt, though not as site-specific as the Festival's recent productions of Debussy’s Pélleas and Strauss’s Ariadne. The unhurried suspense of Wagner’s score (and Robin Ticciati’s conducting) lends itself to the considered grammar and painfully repressed gestures of Victorian life and death, especially in the clerical sphere. The Grail scene unfolds at a dinner table like a climactic chapter from one of Anthony Trollope’s sagas.

When a young man made an unexpected entrance in Act 1, I half-expected him to reveal it was Professor Plum, in the study, with the lead piping. But banish such unworthy thoughts: this is Parsifal, or rather it is Klingsor, the nemesis of the piece who usually turns up in Act 2. Drawing on his backstory as a once and former member of the Grail community, the production recasts him as a fallen angel, even the embodiment of the redemption awaited by Amfortas and won by Parsifal.

Further Victorian-era echoes sound deeper chords. In her tight auburn bun and full-skirted dress, Kristina Stanek’s Kundry is the very picture of Effie Grey, rejected muse to Ruskin, wife and happier inspiration to Millais. Deeper still is the note of unspoken and unspeakable history: Kundry’s reincarnation within Ibsen’s Ghosts, in service of an Amfortas (Audun Iversen) ailing and dying from the most quintessential of 19th-century afflictions.

Robin Ticciati’s conducting was most persuasive when supporting his singers, while drawing out half-tints of colour and harmony from the London Philharmonic to match the muted glow of Fabrice Kebour’s lighting, in this most subtly illuminated of Wagner’s scores. He was less successful at sustaining momentum through the Prelude and Transformation scenes, where a broad overall pulse – no drawback in itself – hung fire.

‘Enlightenment through compassion’ – this is the central theme of Parsifal, perhaps of Wagner’s whole output. The most shocking and disconcerting moment of Mijnssen’s staging arrives at the end of Act 2, when Parsifal chooses not to destroy Klingsor and his works, but instead to embrace him, and to bring him home. A very modern solution, perhaps, but also one which reflects Wagner’s conception of Wotan in the Ring as “Licht-Alberich”: the two sides of a conflict which stirs within each of us.

In that sense, the staging is authentic to both the universal and the Christian elements of the piece: in Klingsor, “the stone which the builders rejected has become the corner stone.” All the same, we pay a price for such insights, and in more profound ways than the jettisoning Kundry’s groans or the knights’ cry of despair. There must surely be more to the Grail Knights than domestic lackeys who rough up Parsifal, take their communion and then disappear like surpliced students of a theological training college. The apotheosis concerns itself at length with Kundry laying Amfortas to rest – but what is Parsifal’s purpose? How will he take the place of Amfortas? Questions for another time, and another Parsifal.

The surtitled translation does some heavy lifting, especially in Act 3, to elide the precise import of Wagner’s text and angle it towards the sense of the action on stage. Ironically, for anyone familiar with what Wagner wrote, the articulation of John Relyea’s Gurnemanz is so strong, making something meaningful from every line of the opera’s longest part, that it becomes harder to suppress a cognitive dissonance between the story we see and the words we hear.

Relyea and his colleagues carried the show, consistently compelling. Stanek drew on a deep and flowing well of lower-register tone. Ryan Speedo Green earned his singular prominence with comparably urgent and yet even singing. Iversen captured all the pathos of Amfortas without compromising a beautifully moulded, song-like projection. Daniel Johansson opened strongly before throttling back a touch halfway through Act 2, but he rose to match Relyea’s supreme eloquence in the Good Friday scene. When not piped over speakers from offstage, the Glyndebourne Chorus sounded glorious. In fact the Flowermaidens of Act 2 – a whole chorus of Effie Greys – presented one of the production's most striking moments, transforming on a sixpence from Klingsor’s nightmare of governesses into Parsifal’s fantasy of schoolgirls. The perruquiers of Glyndebourne have had their hands full.